Why you should get vaccinated

If you know me, I love metaphors to recreate things in way everyday people could understand. Credits to uhh… well, every single vaccination article and video I’ve seen. I’m just gonna use a different tactic here.

Think of the virus as a video game with only one life. The stronger the virus is, the higher its level is. And our immune system has its own AI that learns how to best kill the viruses. By default, it has almost no idea.

Practice mode: vaccines

The vaccine introduces a weak virus to your body. Let’s say the vaccine is like a ‘practice mode’. You practice with a weak blueprint of a virus that’s too weak to really kill you, but you have no idea how to kill it.

Your body starts trying out techniques as to how to kill that little virus. Eventually, it finds out the perfect combination of attacks and kills the weak little virus.

Level 20: the virus

Then you get the actual virus at level 20. It’s a strong one, but you know its weaknesses and your body knows exactly how to kill it. The virus tries to fight back, unlike the practice mode virus.

Your body will eventually kill the virus… although you might be weak, or sometimes you might even be dead before that happens, but the virus will have been weakened by your body, if only a little.

Meanwhile an unvaccinated person - someone who hasn’t done the practice mode - gets a level 20 virus too. The body tries to experiment new moves, not knowing how to kill it, but since the virus is at an advantage, having already infected many people, it spreads.

It does the same things as it would in practice mode, except the virus is a lot stronger. At some point, the body will be able to kill the virus, but more damage has already been done.

Level 30+: variants

Now, what about the Delta variants and such? Well, people may say that the vaccines ‘aren’t effective’ but that’s not the full story.

The variants are like level 30 viruses. It’s seen people who’d been vaccinated, and knows newer techniques to infect you.

If you haven’t had the practice mode, you’ll be even weaker against the level 30 virus than you would be with a level 20 virus. But if you had, you’ll know how to defeat a level 20 virus; the level 30 virus is just a lot harder to kill, but you know at least a couple of techniques.

The vaccines are still effective against variants, just not as effective as they are to the original viruses.

NOTE 23 Jul 2023: there is probably a couple of misconceptions and misinformation here… Please ignore that. I was younger and didn’t fact-check and was also just writing away as I pleased. Still, you should go vaccinate. A lot of the things I said here make sense.